It’s kind of odd to hit a year-change with no Year’s Best duties but I’ve been enjoying reading many other Best of Year/Decade lists—and the odd squeak about how this isn’t the end of the decade, dammit! I will miss the year-in-summary but I certainly couldn’t write it this year—or any year soon.

Apparently by the end of the world (2012) we will have “golden fleece’ lozenges” containing “interferon alpha, a protective protein made naturally by the body when attacked by a virus” which would mean not being hit with a grotty cold-like thing first thing in the year. Can’t come fast enough. Blech.

Also, maybe by 2012 Apple will have developed a power cord that doesn’t break every couple of years. How often do you see this rating in the Apple Store:

Customer Ratings Based on 1139 reviews

Bah. Hard to get excited about the iSlate while our two old MacBooks are sharing a cord!

So, given that the the last couple of days have been cold-days here is some catch-up blathery mostly from the old year so that, maybe, just maybe, after this ohnine will be deid and ohten will not be the new year, it will just be the year.

First: thanks! Our fundraising sale raised just under a $1,000 for Franciscan Hospital for Children—so we made up the difference and will be dropping a check in the mail this week. A good piece of that total came a buck at a time but there were many people who paid retail price. Yay! We have a fundraiser reading coming in March in Boston which should be fun. Will, of course, keep you posted,

Second: Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden is a finalist in the Cybils Awards in the Middle-Grade Fantasy & Science Fiction category. Yay for the Armitage family! (Did we mention it was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the parenting part of Toronto Star? 2008, 2009, who cares when it came out: we all know it’s a great book.)

And more: Much love was apportioned to Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes at the end of year multi-critic list at Strange Horizons. It’s not a book for every reader but for those it hits, yep, it is the thing.

Poppy Brite’s Second Line continues to get coverage at home. New Orleans Magazine says, “Her novels Liquor, Prime and Soul Kitchen have introduced readers to the wild world of Chefs John Rickey and Gary “G-man” Stubbs. The couple lives for food and the art of making it as many New Orleanians do. The two stories in Second Line serve as earlier and later chapters in the steamy soap opera saga.”

Holly Black was interviewed by Veronika about spooky dolls, what’s coming up, and so on. We’re getting her book ready to send to the printer—it will be our biggest book for a while, so it’s pretty exciting.

Kelly’s second collection Magic for Beginners made two other Best of the Decade lists: HTML Giant and the Village Voice—both of these make pretty great To-Read lists. Also weird and great to find on the web was Bryan Lee O’Malley enjoyed “Magic for Beginners.” Huh and wow. Maybe after Scott Pilgrim 6 is done he’ll do MFB as a comic. Cough. But then the comments today include infinite boners, so readers beware. In wandering about his site I downloaded one of his albums (recorded as Kupek)—it’s no Sex Bob-omb (cough, again) but it’s worth checking out.

For new stuff, ah, come back tomorrow or next week. And in the mean time, cheers!

Just had a fun (seriously) couple of phone calls with the Copyright Office about Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories. The question was about who had compiled the collection, which was, happily, easily answered, as Joan herself had put the book together before she died. Which means, of course, that the in-house editing job was much easier than otherwise—and thanks to Joan’s estate’s agent, Charles Schlessiger, getting the stories was almost easy, too.

The copyright is owned by Joan’s children but the copyright to the whole book isn’t theirs, as there is an introduction by Garth Nix and illustrations by Andi Watson. Who knew that they would tweeze thigns apart so finely?

This seems as good a time as any to mention that Joan’s fans should pick up a copy of the May/June issue of The Horn Book as there is a piece worth reading by Lizza Aiken about her mother, Joan.

Looks like the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List is out and it includes some of our books. If you’re so inclined, you can vote for these in the Locus Poll (soon) and the Hugos (now). (Don’t forget Couch!)

There are a ton of great books on the list, some of which are pasted below. Since we stopped reading for The Year’s Best in late November, and we usually read most of the material for the book from November to January, this list is certainly not exclusive. The Amazon links below are cut (libraries and indie bookshops are it) and the cut’n’paste was done on the fly, so it’s a sample of stuff we liked, but very messy!

“The Serial Garden” is my happiest discovery this year. I say this without being influenced in the least by what happens to Mr. Armitage in “The Frozen Cuckoo.” As I conclude my hymn of praise, I am certainly not thinking of how, shortly after Mr. Armitage pans A. Whizzard’s “shockingly bad book on spells and runes,” the incensed author requisitions the Armitage house, then turns him into a bird that later gets trapped in an ice cube.

We promise to at least deliver you some verynice books, if not the kind of “returns” Bernard Madoff was promising. Ah, the system shows itself to be built on sand after all. What’s that? No more foundation money for us? But… but… we had been relying on… oh, yes, that old thing: sales. Fingers crossed that Couch and The Serial Garden keep doing what they’re doing!

The Harvard Book Store chose it for their Holiday Hundred List and have stacked it up in unmissably high piles throughout the store—all at 20% off. Yay!

“An excellent way to show Harry Potter fans that magic can come in small doses too.”
—Author Magazine

“The Armitage’s world grows richer as it is extended. This is a collection of stories which allow — in fact demand — the reader joins in with their own imagination and remakes the story inside their own head. Aiken’s pragmatism shows through in her stories. Instead of remaining in or reflecting upon the past like some of her contemporaries, they show an author making the best of the world and coming out ahead with humor and imagination.”
—January Magazine

What’s going on with Couch? We got some great entries in the couch competition and we’ll get those online and announce the winner soon. We have a small and exciting Portland-based surprise, more about that in January; John Joseph Adams talked to Ben about it at Sci-Fi Wire; and it’s an Indie Next List pick for January and we are going to force Ben back out on the road. He puts on a good show: there’s the couch moving part, the crying, the sharks, the whole 4,000 miles in 20 minutes or so.

Go wish John Crowley a Happy Birthday—but let’s not depress him any more than the Writer’s Almanac already did. Wonder if this means John will be on Prairie Home Companion one day? (And, what would he sing?)

It’s the birthday of the writer John Crowley, (books by this author) born in 1942 in Presque Isle, Maine. His most famous novel is Little, Big (1981). It’s a fantasy story, full of fairies and enchantment, but it’s also an epic saga of a New England family, complete with historical details. The critic Harold Bloom chose Little, Big as one of the books that changed his life. He said, “I have read and reread Little, Big at least a dozen times, and always am startled and refreshed.” John Crowley has a cult following, and his novels always get great reviews, but they still don’t sell very well, partly because they’re so hard to categorize.

“She had a curious childhood. She didn’t go to school until she was 12, she was brought up not in much contact with children at all. Her mother married her step father when she was 5. He was essentially a Victorian much in the same way as the books in the house. There were no children’s books, and there weren’t that many books for children in the 1920s, so she read whatever was in the house which were Dickens, Dumas and Austen.

Tonight we’ll be in Boston with Benjamin Parzybok for his reading at 7 PM at Pandemonium Books (ok, Cambridge) then Ben will take his tour back to the west coast. So far no one on the east coast has brought a couch to a reading. Boston couch carriers, represent! (We do have some nice pics of couches, will get those online soon.)

Sat. Dec 6th, 5:00 PM: Author and Indie Publisher Kelly Link interviewed by Lizzie Skurnick
Kelly Link has built a serious cult following with her uncanny and affecting fiction. She flirts with fable, fantasy, and horror and stands among the best of short-story writers. After two collections, Link’s new book, Pretty Monsters, is targeted at young adults — though she hasn’t turned down her sublime strangeness one bit. Link is also the co-publisher of Small Beer Press. Lizzie Skurnick is a writer, editor, poet, and, according to Forbes.com, “one of the smartest bloggers on the Web.”

“My feeling, after reading Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, that its protagonists, the Dashwoods, have so much verve, aplomb and admirable self-control that they are a bit underchallenged by merely arranging for matrimony in Georgian England, and that if, say, they were living on the body of a colossal naked giant who was living on a fractal series of ever-larger naked giants…”

Shelf Awareness had a note on Powell’s new solar array which will provide 25% of the power for their warehouse—another reason to support this amazing indie bookstore. In our town there’s a fantastic toy store, A2Z, which installed something like 40 panels to (again) provide about 25% of their power. You can see a snapshot of the power generation system every 15 minutes or so—not quite yet as it’s a bit dark and rainy here this morning.

There’s a movement online to buy books for Christmas—or the holiday of your choice—which is a fine idea (although we also like gifts given to Heifer, Greenpeace, Amnesty, Habitat, etc.) especially as this year we have the perfect gift book: Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden—we just got a great note from Politics and Prose in DC saying they are “delighted to carry it; Joan Aiken is a favorite of ours.” Yay!

The story of The Serial Garden had always haunted her, and many of her readers too, and I think she felt a real duty to try and resolve the terrible sadness of its ending. It was her idea to use the name of this story for this collection, and I understand that this was why she chose it. She had written a couple more stories about its hero, Mr Johansen and his lost Princess, and gave them the possibility of a happy ending, but perhaps was still worried that she had been unduly harsh to Mrs Armitage, whose brisk spring cleaning had caused an unwitting tragedy. Mrs Armitage was in many ways a portrait of Joan’s mother, and it is she who is really redeemed in a later story, Milo’s New Word and remembered as the patient and loving mother she really was.

The book has an illustration for each story by UK illustrator Andi Watson (who we’re going to interview here, if you have any questions for him, send them along).

The Serial Garden was reviewed on The Cultural Gutter: (“It would be perfect for reading to kids”) and on Green Man Review (“Readers of all ages have the opportunity to enjoy some of the best writing by one of the most superb and timeless fantasy writers”) and is a pick of the week on a kid’s radio show(!):

This week’s show’s Book Time with Ella will be about the late Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden.

and was a recent critic’s pick at Salon: “Buy it to read to your kids, and you’ll find yourself sneaking tastes on the sly; a little Aiken is a fine thing to have in your system at any age.”

This Sunday we’ll be in New York City for an event at Books of Wonder celebrating the book’s publication (and picking up a few cupcakes!) with one of our favorite writers, Michael Dirda, Joan’s daughter (which makes her Conrad Aiken‘s granddaughter) Lizza Aiken, and Joan’s long-time US literary agent, Charles Schlessiger.

“The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories” by Joan Aiken
Throughout her life, Aiken, one of the 20th century’s greatest authors of children’s fiction, wrote stories about the Armitage family: a mother, father, sister and brother whose lives in a rural British village are routinely disrupted by magic — mostly on Mondays. Unicorns overrun the garden, the Board of Incantation attempts to requisition their house for a school for wizards, and the annoying kids next door get turned into sheep. The delicious unflappability of the parents is one of the most amusing aspects of these tales. Mrs. Armitage barely looks up from her knitting when her husband observes that the two children are riding broomsticks in the backyard: “I think it’s much better for them to get that sort of thing out of their systems when they’re small.” Buy it to read to your kids, and you’ll find yourself sneaking tastes on the sly; a little Aiken is a fine thing to have in your system at any age. — Laura Miller

The former of these just called asking if we had lots of copies of Joan Aiken‘s book in stock…. Which has to be good news and is as good a time as any to mention an event we’re sending out invitations to (consider yourself served with an invitation):

We will celebrate the publication of The Serial Garden with a conversation between Michael Dirda and Joan Aiken‘s daughter Lizza Aiken and Joan’s lovely and esteemed long-time US literary agent, Charles Schlessiger of Brandt & Hochman.

We just got copies of Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories—which should have been called The Complete Treasury of Armitage Family Stories because it’s so darn pretty! Each story has a title page illustration by Andi Watson—here’s one, with 24 stories plus a few extras there have to be, um, 20+ in the book.

What else is in the book? A mistake in the author bio that John Clute spotted. very enjoyable and fascinating introductions by Garth Nix and Joan’s daughter, Lizza. The Prelude to the series that Joan wrote. An afternoon up a tree* reading. Four new stories that are published here for the first time. The Big Mouth House name in glittery gold on the spine and the web site inside (still to do in the 2 weeks before the pub date of Oct. 28).

Pre-orders will be shipping this week and the book will be it in stores in a couple of weeks. This is a book we designed to be something we’d love to receive as kids—so if you know a smart kid who needs a good book, you know what to do.

The first review comes from Kirkus:

The Armitages’ wacky magic (usually a Monday occurrence) and that of their fantastical town, a place filled with witches and magical beings, rises from the pages when matters go slightly awry, in the manner of Edward Eager and E. Nesbit.

If Michael is in on Friday (he was in Denver at a beer fest, so who knows if we will get him back!) we’ll ask him to take some of those great book pics he takes and post them. In the meantime, here’s the unboxing and a floored reader modelling our latest non-t-shirt:

* In the attic, on the couch, in the library, on the bus, you know how it goes, yes?

Publishers Weekly introduces our new imprint, Big Mouth House, to the world in a nice piece that also mentions Kelly’s new collection, Pretty Monsters:

When Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, founders of Small Beer Press in Easthampton, Mass., first considered publishing children’s books several years ago, they had a problem: the name of their press sounded like a brewery.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Beer? Anyway, it’s true: we are slowly and carefully opening out a new imprint for readers of all ages: Big Mouth House.

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”
—Philip Pullman

At some point soon the Big Mouth web site will become better and we’ll put up more about forthcoming books, guidelines (queries only, no picture books for the foreseeable future), and so on.

For the moment, The Serial Garden is Big Mouth House: one book that is so lovely and has been such fun to work on that we can’t wait to get it back from the printer (the proofs are due tomorrow!).